Beyond Organic Local Farm Products

Building Our Top Bar Hives

Martha and I would like to share with you our experience building our own Barrel Top Bar Hives (TBH). This is not meant to be a step-by-step tutorial, but rather a general overview of the steps we took and lessons learned during the process,. There are plenty of excellent step-by-step tutorials out on the internet you can follow if you need that level of help. You’re also welcome to post questions here and we’ll happily answer them to assist you in your process!

Original 55-Gallon Barrel

The largest component in a barrel TBH is obviously the barrel. Lots of people from what we read online said they had cheap to free access to 55-gallon food grade barrels but we had to buy ours. If you live in the Northern Virginia area we highly recommend NOVA Barrel. They have a great selection of barrels and very reasonable prices. We were able to get a food grade 55-gallon barrel from NOVA Barrel for just $35. One thing that was really nice about the model they had was the top rim completely snapped off when we were cutting the barrel in half which provided a flatter surface and eliminated the need to cut the rim off (a step shown in the earlier referenced tutorial).

The rest of the components needed (wood and screws) we purchased at Lowes using the 10% off coupon mentioned in the last post. In total I believe we bought about $150 worth of materials for the bee hive portion. As you’ll learn later we decided to add a lot to the hives after the main portion was finished which added to our final cost.

From here on I’ll list the photos with a brief description for each of the main steps in our assembly process.

All the lumber prior to cutting for the hives.

We did our best to try and optimize the cut lengths of the pieces we knew we would need and find the best sizes of lumber. We ended up doing a pretty good job, the only scrap wood we ended up with were little bits and pieces!

Cut our 2×4 pieces at 68 degree angles for the legs.

Depending on how tall you want your hives to stand and how wide you want the leg base to be you can easily calculate the angle and length of the 2×4 leg pieces to cut. I believe we cut ours so they would stand about 3 feet tall.

Making guide line to cut barrel in half.

This part required two people to hold the string taught and then trace a line along it to guide our cuts.

Cut a ventilation slit in the barrels, doubles as a drop to reduce mites.

A lot of people have asked about this cut in the bottom. The idea was to mimic the screened hive bottom used in some Langstroth hives which allows more ventilation through the hive and the mites to fall out of the hive. If I were to do it again I’d make the slit go the entire length of the barrel. The width should be based largely on the temperatures you expect your hives will be exposed to.

All the wood pieces cut before assembly onto the barrels.

Assembling the legs with a single 2×4 cross-bar support piece.

Attaching hive frame to barrels.

Placed the legs along side the barrel flush with the frame.

Make sure to use plenty of screws to attach legs to the barrel as they will support lots of weight when full of bees and honey!

Attaching molding pieces to top bar base.

I used wood glue to attach the molding pieces, once dried a little I screwed them in with two screws on alternating sides. These are what the bees will use as the base to build their comb.

Cutting the roof sections.

Some guides use tin roof for the top bar hives. I found this rubber based material at Lowes for less than the cost of a tin roof and hopefully will not be as hot to touch to keep the temperature in the hives more manageable.

Used some old window screen as a cover for the ventilation slits.

Any type of screen that is small enough for bees to not easily fall through would probably work. We just happened to have some old storm window screens available to re-purpose.

Stapled the mesh to the bottom of the barrels to keep bees from falling through.

Had to hammer the staples down a little so they were flush with the bottom of the barrel after stapling them.

Initial Assembly Complete!

Ta-da! The “finished” hives! Well, really first stage of being “finished”. One could technically call it quits at this point and have two functional hives. At this point we had some more ideas that we wanted to try out which you’ll just have to check back later to read about!